Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen (30 May 1903-9 January 1946) was an American poem, novelist, and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance.

Biography
Countee LeRoy Porter was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1903, and he was raised by his grandmother in Harlem until her death in 1918. He took the surname of his guardian, the AME Church reverend and civil rights activist Frederick A. Cullen, and he went to NYU and Harvard. During the 1920s, he took part in the Harlem Renaissance, and he believed that poetry surpassed race. He died of high blood pressure in 1946.